Friday, August 18, 2006

In-flight movies

So you know that point in the movie when the criminal mastermind is just about to kill our hero, Vin Van Diesel Damme, but first he has to give us his tedious self-congratulatory world domination speech, featuring some impossibly complicated laser/diamond/computer hack logistics with so many variables we already know it's doomed to failure?
The current international airlines B-movie fire drill reads very much the same way, doesn't it?
I mean, who writes this shit?
If I was a terrorist intent on bringing down a plane and I was following all these absurdly elaborate doomsday plots in the papers, I'd be thinking to myself - What's wrong with a nice simple Surface-to-Air missile?

For those of you not yet suffering from terminal terror burn-out, Rational Reasons has a great round-up of terror busting links, including that great essay by Craig Murray in which he points out that some of the suspects lacked both passports and airline tickets and had never made a bomb.
And POGGE links to a piece at The Register outlining the logistical difficulties of carefully mixing smelly volatile temperature-sensitive chemicals in an aircraft loo over the 24 hour time frame required to concoct anything even remotely effective.

Yeah, I know, everyone's a critic.

4 comments:

Reel Fanatic said...

This may be more than slightly off-topic, but I saw the single worst movie of my entire life on a plane recently .. It was called something like "Little Big League," and appeared to be about a kid who somehow managed to become owner of the Minnesota Twins .. pure tripe, but I had finished my book, so I sat through it anyway

Mike said...

Thanks for the link.

I'm flying to Chicago next week so I'll get to experience this all first hand. I can harldy wait.


Now, if the in flight movie is "Snakes on a Plane" all will be forgiven.

RossK said...

Who writes this crap?

Well, apparently, in the case of this Snakes in 'Cigar Tubes' thing nobody did?

Specifically, once the crap was in the can the film 'makers' decided they needed to 'R' it up some more. Thus, they called the CGI folks back and told them throw in more gore.

When the programmers asked for a revised script they were told there wasn't one so they just started dumping all over the thing, sans words, plot, dialogue or anything remotely approximating reason or logic.

Kind of like Rovian foreign policy I suppose.

Q said...

It's all scary, the bad movies the plane threats, I don't mind the snakes as much... wake me up in November when there might be some new direction in all of this 'US versus them' crap.

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